The Return of The Invisible Ghost: Further Apparitional Observation & Top-Down Processing

When last we left the brilliant but attentionally-blinded Cantabrigian parapsychologist Anthony D. Cornell he had just missed out on a psychological breakthrough some four-decades ahead of its time. His further, seemingly frustration-driven, experimentation into apparitional observation would, however, soon put him in position to narrowly miss out on even more psychological insights. But such is the way with our perception under the far from inerrant influence of top-down processing.

St Peter’s Churchyard on Castle Hill was chosen for initial follow-up in May 1960 as being more conducive to apparitional experiences, a well-considered move in light of what we now know about the expectation effect. This, however, for the most part, merely confirmed his previous findings as, once again, the vast majority of the estimated 142 passersby paid no attention to Tony’s increasingly desperate antics. Twenty minutes of flitting around the graves covered head to foot in butter muslin and moaning elicited only two responses: one presumed it an art student and the other, a mad man in a dress.

Tony then took his experiment to a screening at the Rex Cinema. So as not to disturb the kiddies, Tony chose an X-rated film, most likely Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and not a porno as the filthy-minded Mary Roach suggests in Spook (2005), and did his ghost walk back (30 secs) and forth (20 secs) across a black-and-white preview, most likely for The Last Angry Man (1959). A highly-scientific show of hands during the interval showed 46% of the audience missed his first pass and 32% (including the projectionist) missed both passes, even more interesting, however, is what those that saw something claimed to have seen.

The eye-witness discrepancies Tony had originally set out to investigate were apparent, with the audience variously reporting such things as a fault in the film, a young girl in a summer dress, a woman in a sari, a man walking backwards, and a polar bear. Tony notes that only those in the know (the experimenters and the cinema manager) accurately perceived what had been presented, coming dangerously close to insights into such psychological factors as priming and top-down processing, before reverting to his previous conclusion about psi-factors and ruling further such experimentation futile.

Tony’s dismissal of the possibility that the majority of apparitional experiences can be easily explained away as hallucination, misses the somewhat surprising conclusion, indicated by his own research, that all perception is to some extent hallucination. Our extremely limited senses, as demonstrated by inattentional blindness, provide insufficient data to create a veridical perception of the external world. So, to make up for this, our brains interpret and augment this impoverished sensory data using our own prior experience and expectancy to create the controlled hallucination that is our perception.

With sufficient sensory information, bottom-up processing can easily determine what is being perceived, as with two amused participants confronted by Tony in a re-creation for the cameras on the well-lit street in front of St Peter’s who could see his feet sticking out from the muslin. However, when such info is too impoverished, top-down processing kicks-in using expectation to interpret what is being perceived. Hence those in the know saw Tony in his sheet, but those not, rationalised it using prior experience (what exactly those experiences were for the participant reporting a polar bear in the Rex, one can only wonder).

One final experiment that demonstrates this had Tony flitting about an Essex garden in a phosphorescent-painted sheet while a party went on inside the house. Of those whose attention was drawn to the figure only the barman believed what he saw to be supernatural. Tony elucidates that this witness had been “psychologically conditioned” by a previous experience of seeing angels as he went over-the-top at Vimy Ridge in 1917. With this observation Tony again comes perilously close to profound psychological insights, before once again sadly falling back on the woo of claiming “subtle psi-factors” to be at work.

Tony's quirky experiments and failure to recognise expectancy did not end here, so join me one last time, as we bring the house down on this paranormal trilogy.

Source: Cornell, A. D. (1960). ‘Further experiments in apparitional observation’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 40 (706), 409-418.

We discussed some more of Tony's research as part of our 2021 Halloween special on the seemingly pseudoscientific ideas put forward to explain the phenomenon known as ghosts on Cambridge Skeptics: Live!